This month, we continue with our theme of radiating love. This time, we orient to the country each of us lives in, sending love to the Spirit of that country. Then, include all the people and other earth-kin who inhabit your country. Also radiate love to the Nature of your country, including every life form, including lakes, rivers, wetlands, deserts, mountains, waterfalls, prairies, forests, jungles, the ocean–whatever expressions of Nature are part of your country’s essential physical being.
I am living with cats for the first time in 24 years. There are three of them, all related, and less than a year old. What I’m aware of constantly these days is how much more often I find myself smiling. I’m kind of a “smiley” person to begin with, so it’s not new territory to me but—even with that familiarity—I’m surprised by how much moreof the time I seem to find myself smiling.
Recently, I saw a clip from Fox News that got me to thinking about how many of us now engage conversations not to understand one another but to convince or to show that we are “right”. Read More “Week 665: Rediscovering Curiosity”
I wrote last week about drawing on steadiness as a form of subtle activism. Another quality that is sorely needed within our human family is the expression of kindness. Here in the United States, we’ve had an unfortunate shift toward a lack of civility toward one another, and it seems that there is a lessening of kindness in many places on the planet. This lack of kindness, and an accompanying lack of care, extends to our other-than-human earth-kin and to the planet in general.
Kindness and care are expressions of the heart more than the head. They are heart-centered responses and it’s possible to strengthen the tendency to express kindness and care when we offer ourselves practices that orient to heart perception and intelligence. I’ve written about this a lot and continue to return to it because of its central role in helping us to be with one another in more compassionate ways.
Drawing on a combination of information from HeartMath (www.heartmath.org) and other sources, I’ve spent a good bit of time orienting to my “heart brain” and to checking in with what my heart thinks about various issues. How often the heart perceives things differently from how the head brain understands them and how helpful it can be to have both perspectives available!
This month, we continue our theme of the range of relationships we have with the world around us and how we bring our presence to these many connections, even those we may not think about often but are aspects of our everyday experience. In this meditation, we bring to mind the many people and life-forms who work behind the scenes to make our life possible. Those who make it possible for us to have food to eat; those who bring electricity, water, and other necessities into our lives. All the people who contribute in ay way to items used in daily life, including gadgets, household items, clothing, and more. In this meditation, we offer gratitude and blessings to all…
Below are two version of the meditation. One is audio only and the other is audio with images of nature. Please remember never to listen to these audio meditations when driving or operating dangerous machinery…
It’s a Sunday morning and, when I have time, I listen to On Being with Krista Tippett. It comes on at 7am on the East Coast and is an inspiring and nourishing way to begin the day. This morning, she interviewed neuroscientist Richard Davidson and they talked about a lot of things that have kept me thinking throughout the day.
One of the themes was neuroplasticity, the ways in which our brains change with new learning. Davidson talked about how our behavior around and with others changes their brains and that got me to thinking, yet again, how important it is to model kindness as we move through our daily lives. The implication from neuroplasticity is that if we are taking actions or speaking in ways that convey kindness, we are literally spreading that around as people’s brains spontaneously respond to our acts of kindness.
I’ve written many times about the importance of being aware of the frequencies with which we resonate in any given moment, and of the impact they have not only on our internal quality of life but also on the quality of our engagement with our environment and the people and situations we encounter along the way. In every moment, we have choice as to how we respond to what’s happening to and around us.
You can think of frequencies as qualities. What qualities do you like to resonate with in your life? Do you enjoy feeling delight, ease, quiet, compassion? Do you find that you often engage fear or anger? Most of us feel the whole array of possible frequencies, given the moments in time and the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
One thing I want to be sure to say at this point is that choosing the frequencies with which we want to resonate doesn’t mean not choosing to act when action is called for. I always think of the Dalai Lama when someone asked him if he ever gets angry. He said that he certainly did. Then he mentioned the importance of compassionate action when we experience injustice, for example, and that makes us angry. So, what I share here is not an invitation to passivity. Instead, it’s an invitation to more consistently notice the frequencies with which you resonate so that you have a moment of choice.
For example, when we find ourselves resonating with frequencies that are distressing or agitating, or when we lose awareness that we have jumped into one of these frequencies with both feet, we probably don’t end up feeling so good about our experience. A key here is to cultivate enough ongoing awareness to be able to notice when we become captivated or captured by a frequency that we don’t really like. Then, we can hopefully shift our attention to a frequency that feels more constructive.
An example might be a time when you are moving into irritation. If you can catch that, you might decide to shift to an awareness of the steadiness you carry in the core of your body and take a moment to settle in. When I feel irritation coming on, I do one of two things. If it’s during the day when I’m up and about, I shift into an awareness of my heart space and choose a quality of ease or flexibility with which I want to meet the experience that was irritating me. A very mundane and not-at-all dramatic example of this is when one of my feline family members started doing something in the middle of the night that woke me up every night at about 3am. When I found myself getting irritated, I reminded myself that the only person that would hurt was me, so I shifted to imagining myself filling up with light, throughout my whole body, and that put me back to sleep. Fortunately, the next day I found a solution to stop the middle-of-the-night antics and I saved myself from a sleepless night stirred up by irritation.
Here’s a practice focused on choosing frequencies. It can be a daily or weekly practice. It’s based on something I learned in a metaphysical school many, many years ago.
Choose the frequency with which you want to resonate this week. I suggest focusing on it for a week in order to become very familiar with the quality and tone of the frequency, which will make it easier to elicit when you want or need it.
Then, four times a day, at least, return to that frequency and affirm it as your choice to resonate with throughout the week.
Do so:
When you arise in the morning At noon At dusk When you go to bed in the evening
In addition, when you first bring the frequency into awareness and touch into its qualities, give yourself some time to orient to the following:
Notice your whole body-mind experience of resonating with the frequency you have chosen for this week:
The sensations that arise in your body. The tone and quality of your emotional experience. The tone and quality of your mental experience. The tone and quality of your spiritual experience.
Also notice the quality of your thoughts and behaviors throughout the week, becoming increasingly aware of how the frequencies with which you resonate have an immediate impact on your behavior and interactions with yourself and others. And, please remember that your self-talk is a form of self-hypnosis and the quality and tone of it truly matters.
Also, please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion and to pat gently on the head any judgments that may arise, allowing them to move on through without your having to do anything with or about them.
Here’s the audio version of this practice if you’d rather listen to it. Also, please remember never to listen to guided audio meditations while driving or using dangerous machinery.
